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Report by
Dave Usher at Anfield
Not clinical enough and defensively suspect. Stop me if you’ve heard this before. I don’t even know what the answer is anymore, we’ve seen this so often and at this point there’s absolutely no reason to think it won’t continue.
We’re as bad defensively as we’ve ever been but I’m not sure how you fix it when it’s often just stupid individual errors by different players. We can’t even blame Lovren or Moreno for this as Lovren cried off with a back injury (must have caught it off Phil) and Moreno was rested. Whoever lines up in that back four though, we’re just so easy to score against.
Burnley didn’t even try to attack; they were not interested in having the ball and barely ventured out of their own half. Yet they scored one and could easily have had another without actually doing anything out of the ordinary. A long ball that we didn’t deal with, a second ball we didn’t react to and just like that we’re 1-0 down. It’s inexcusable how easy we make it for opponents to score. They rarely have to work for it as we just hand it to them.
Conceding like that was the last thing we needed coming off the back of the loss to City and throwing away a win against Sevilla. The feel good factor that was there after smashing Hoffenheim and Arsenal as recently as three weeks ago has has quickly been replaced by jitters, mistrust and disillusionment. Things are not as bad as they seem right now and a couple of wins will get us back on track, but frigging hell it’s stressful watching us at the moment.
It’s not even that we’re playing badly. For most of the game against Sevilla we were ok and there were spells where we were outstanding. None of it matters when you are throwing away the result with defensive incompetence. It was the same in this one. I thought the performance was mostly fine overall but it doesn’t really matter does it? We needed to win the game, we should have won the game, but we didn’t.
Klopp made seven changes which obviously leaves him open for criticism from some, because rotation is a contentious business and you can't please everyone unless you win every game. I was fine with the number of changes made as he definitely needed to freshen things up.
The only issue I had was that Oxlade-Chamberlain didn’t start. Why pay nearly £40m for him if he’s not going to play when either Mané or Salah is missing? Wasn’t that the whole fucking reason to sign him so we didn’t have to keep using Firmino wide? Apparently not.
So once again we had Roberto being shunted out to the left as Sturridge was given the start in the centre. Sturridge deserved a chance to play and it was an ideal opportunity to rest Firmino and give Chamberlain a go. But no, we were subjected to Firmino out wide and once again he failed to make any significant contribution, despite working his nuts off and showing some nice close control.
It’s just pointless putting him there, but - as with other issues such as, oh I don’t know, defending - Klopp has his own ideas and it appears nothing is going to change that. It’s frustrating but, *shrugs*, what can we do?
Sturridge was ok I thought. Not great but not terrible either. He looked quite sharp with the ball but was uncharacteristically poor with his shooting. His first two efforts were weak as piss but he did go closer with another couple of attempts, one which hit the side netting and another gorgeous chip that sailed just over. Perhaps the best chance he had was when he failed to get anything on a brilliant right wing cross from Milner.
It’s not easy when you’re not playing much but Sturridge can’t have any complaints about that. To get into a rhythm you need to play but he’s been so unreliable with his fitness we can’t really consider him to be anything more than a high quality back up these days. He’s also going to have to look out for Dom Solanke coming for his place too, as that lad has definitely got something and might be pushing for a place far sooner than any of us thought.
I like Robertson even if Coutinho clearly doesn’t. I lost count of the number of times the full back went on the overlap only for Coutinho to ignore and cut inside into traffic. When Robertson does get the ball he usually looks like he'll do something with it.
Defensively he didn't have much to do, but he did make one terrific covering block on the front post in the first half. Rightly or wrongly, the first thing I thought when that happened was that there was no way in hell Moreno was covering like that. We need to see more of Robertson to be absolutely sure, but what he's done so far has been good.
Coutinho was doing my head in though because his decision making was dreadful. He seemed to be trying to play hero ball all day; either wanting to make space for a shot or trying to play a killer pass every time he got the ball. And his shooting was garbage, he even managed to put one into the top tier of the Anny Road with one pathetic effort.
Whether it’s because he’s playing for himself or if he’s simply trying too hard to make amends for what happened, we’ll find out in time I guess. Some of his touches and turns when receiving possession in midfield were different class but it invariably came to nothing and his performance mirrored the afternoon as a whole - frustrating.
The thing is, it’s easy to say “it’s only Burnley, we should be battering these” but the truth is that Burnley rarely get battered by anyone. They’re really difficult to play against because they’re organised, hard working, and have no qualms whatsoever about playing completely unattractive football that will win them few friends. They don’t care, they’ll just do their thing regardless.
Spurs couldn’t beat them and Chelsea lost to them. That doesn’t make us drawing with them ok, but I’m just saying that to beat Burnley you either need to play very well or have some good fortune. We didn’t play really well and we had no luck, so we didn't win.
We should have had a penalty though and we hit the bar, so with a bit of luck on either of those incidents we win the game and we’re all talking about what a good three points it is and how encouraging it is to be able to overcome these kind of stubborn opponents.
That’s why I’m trying not to over react to what wasn’t really that bad a display. In fact, when compared to a lot of these type of games we've had in recent years, it was better than most even if the result wasn't.
That being said, you have to be concerned about the goal we let in. I can accept Trent being beaten in the air as that doesn’t create the kind of problem that can’t be dealt with. Matip should have been stronger when challenging Wood and just what the hell was Klavan doing sticking his nose into something he shouldn’t have? Just hold your position and let Matip challenge for the ball.
This fella has 120 odd international caps and probably over 500 Bundesliga games under his belt. He’s been around the block. Physical mistakes are one thing, but these mental errors we’re seeing from our players are just ridiculous and shouldn’t be happening.
He almost cost us late on too when he challenged big Emre for a ball in our box and conceded a corner that Burnley so nearly turned into a goal. There’s nothing Klopp can do about that; this is an experienced player that should be above that kind of error.
The Burnley goal had come totally out of nothing and we’d been playing well up to that point. Salah had been looking sharp and Sturridge had already had a few sights of goal, but conceding such a bad goal shook the crowd’s confidence. It might have gotten really edgy if we hadn’t equalised so soon after.
Nice goal too, as Salah made a good diagonal run and Can picked him out. Mo did the rest with some nice close control and a low finish. He was the best player on the pitch in the first half but was less of a factor after the break.
The second half started well and we had a ten minute spell where it looked like we would score with every attack. At that point Klopp had already fallen out with the fans in the Main Stand once, and it would happen twice more as the tension around the stadium increased with every missed opportunity.
It started when there was an ironic cheer from the Main Stand as Coutinho finally played a pass to Robertson. A minute later it happened again and this time the cheer was taken up by more fans than the first time. I don’t know whether Klopp was pissed off because it happened twice (the point had been made the first time), or whether he was just annoyed that it had happened at all.
He was fucking fuming though and was yelling at the crowd and throwing his arms about. It happened again when the crowd got annoyed at Klavan. What happened there was he was in possession and Coutinho made an angle to receive a pass. He was in space and Klavan appeared to see him but then turned to play a pass back to Matip. The fans kicked off and Klavan quickly changed his mind and played it to Coutinho, but Klopp went nuts again.
The third time was when there was some unnecessary playing around at the back and the crowd got jittery as it looked like we were playing ourselves into trouble. This time Klopp went postal, he was screaming at the crowd and his face was all contorted with rage. I sit not far from him so I’m used to seeing these outbursts from him, but usually it’s mild exasperation or a fairly gentle chiding. This was different, he’d lost it completely.
I don’t like it. Whether he has a point or not isn’t even relevant. You’re not going to control an entire crowd of over 50,000 people and like it or not, fans are going to vent their frustrations when things aren’t going well. Maybe in his perfect little Dortmund utopia that never happened, but you can’t compare the two because German fans are treated much, much better by their clubs and they aren’t being fleeced on ticket prices.
I don’t want to get too bogged down on this though as it’s worthy of an article of its own. I just think on a list of things Klopp should be worried about, the crowd reaction should be way down it, especially as there are bigger problems that are actually his job to solve. Worry about the team Jurgen, because if you fix that then the crowd thing will take care of itself.
There’s a mental issue with these players. They don’t deal with adversity well and they panic too easily. When they didn't get the second goal they got edgy. A similar thing happened against Sevilla and at Watford on opening day, we had the lead in those games but it was only one goal and nerves set in. Blame the crowd for that if you want, but it was not the crowd that caused Klavan and Can to go for the same ball and concede a needless corner. And it wasn’t the crowd who gave Ben Mee a free header from that corner.
Thankfully Matip was on hand to head it off the line, but what happened from the resulting corner? Mee had another free header and Mignolet had to make a good save to keep it out. If that had gone in all hell would have broken loose and the crowd really would have been letting the players have it. If Klopp thought it was bad at 1-1 then God knows how he’d have reacted then. He’d have probably ended up in row six trading punches with punters.
I’d prefer it if he focused on fixing the things that he can actually fix, such as his in game management for one thing. Too often he seems to leave his subs too late, and when you see the impact Solanke has you can’t help but wonder what would have happened if he’d been given an extra 15 minutes.
He attacks balls in the box and he had two decent efforts in the short time he was on. It’s easy to say he should have scored with the chance that hit the bar but for me that was unlucky. The ball came at him quickly and it was slightly behind him. He directed it goalwards and more often than not it would have gone in. Unfortunately it was a fraction high.
Still, it shouldn’t have even come to that because Salah had been tripped in the box seconds before and should have had a pen. I’m not sure I’d have been confident of anyone burying the pen but it would have been nice to have the opportunity.
We didn’t have much luck but you could argue that we don’t deserve any because we don’t help ourselves. We miss too many chances and we give away cheap goals. That’s a bad combination and not one that is conducive to successful football.
You can get away with one of those things but not both. We shouldn’t be this reliant on Mané - especially having signed Salah - yet here we are, in the same predicament we were in last January. No Mané, no wins. Thankfully he only has to sit out two more games because he can’t come back quickly enough.
Team: Mignolet; Alexander-Arnold, Matip, Klavan, Robertson; Can, Milner, Coutinho (Oxlade-Chamberlain); Salah, Sturridge, Firmino (Solanke):
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